How to incorporate Co-Authors Plus into your WordPress theme

Co-Authors Plus is a free WordPress plugin to manage multi-author blogs. If you accept guest posts from your readers and give them credit, you can use this free plugin to manage guest authors very easily. You don’t need to create a new user account for each new guest author.

Co-Authors Plus makes it very simple and easy to manage guest authors but this plugin is not for beginner WordPress users. Because you will have to edit your theme to properly display author information on each blog post.

After installing and activating this plugin, go to Go to Users > Guest Authors to add a new guest author. You can add the first name, last name, and all of the other standard information.

You can also add AIM, Yahoo IM, Jabber / Google Talk, but I think these fields should be replaced with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and other more popular social networks.

How to add/assign a Guest Author

When writing a new post in the Dashboard, you will see a new Author module, You can search for an author, drag and drop to change the position of authors, or remove an author. You can also upload an image for your guest author. If they have a Gravatar account, Co-Author Plus will use the Gravatar image.

Editing your theme to properly display Author bio

After adding new guest authors, you can assign them to any blog post, but to display author info on the front end of your blog, you will have to edit your theme files. It is always recommended to create a child theme when you want to edit your theme files. In my case, I am going to edit biography.php and content-single.php in a child theme based on TwentySixteen.

Open your child theme folder, and create two new files: biography.php and single.php. If you are using Twenty Sixteen as a parent theme, then create a new folder in your child theme and name it template-parts.

Now you need to create two new files in template-parts folder. save these files as

Tahir Taous loves to write about WordPress, Theme Development, Responsive Design and Blogging. He is an expert when it comes to use awesome tools and techniques to create and customize WordPress Themes. Download WordPress Theme Development Toolkit, which reveals best tools for Responsive WordPress theme development.
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Sallie Goetsch

Your code isn’t wrapping–might want to take a look at that. But thanks for the article. I’ve mostly used Co-Authors Plus with Genesis, and there’s a plugin to take care of what you’re talking about doing here, since Genesis has an author box built in. It’s always good to have a sense of what to do yourself.

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